A planter historian blames the revolt on European abolitionists

The proslavery account that shaped British opinion held that neither the free people of colour nor the enslaved had been moved by the pressure of oppression, and that the violence had to be explained by the influence of European radicals. Hormann quotes the passage and then argues against reading it as evidence that the revolution was unthinkable. Colonists had feared a general slave uprising in the Caribbean long before it happened, and after 1791 the fear of a repetition haunted the whole region, including the British West Indian colonies. He also cites the warning of a future black Spartacus in Raynal's history and the successful black revolt imagined in a widely reprinted French novel of 1771. The rising was not unimaginable to planters. It was the thing they had always imagined and dreaded.

An anonymous German engraving of about 1797 shows the rising of 1791 on the northern plain with palm trees and conical roofed houses for tropical atmosphere, while the white figures look lifted from a north European genre painting, the women in familiar headgear and the men in tight suits. An image of the cruelty of the blacks in a Swiss almanac of 1803 does the same work through architecture, staging a murder in a room with a tiled floor, an arched doorway and portraits and a map on the walls. White argues that these choices are deliberate rather than ignorant, since the makers invented fanciful costume for the enslaved and could have used French styles for the colonists. Dressing the victims as locals delivered an anti revolutionary message to German and Swiss viewers, and shows that printmakers could not count on shared skin colour alone to produce sympathy across old European rivalries.

Naval war with Britain had destroyed the French merchant fleet, leaving Saint-Domingue dependent on American shipping, so when Congress embargoed French colonies in retaliation for privateering the colony's export economy stopped. Louverture wrote to Adams expressing surprise and sadness that American vessels had abandoned his ports, and sent Joseph Bunel to carry the letter and argue the case. Girard notes that Louverture staffed his civil administration almost entirely with white secretaries, priests, merchants and clerks, since Black and mixed-race men dominated the army, and that sending a white envoy to a slaveholding republic was ordinary politics rather than an anomaly. Bunel met Secretary of State Pickering and a congressional delegation from South Carolina, then dined with Adams. Pickering, describing the mission in his correspondence, identified Louverture as the Black commander in chief and called Bunel merely a messenger, saying nothing of his colour.

News of the French takeover of the Dutch Republic and the creation of the Batavian Republic had already been part of Tula's argument the previous year. In 1796 it worked its way through the colonial administration. The ancien régime governor Johannes de Veer withdrew and was replaced by a politically colourless local bureaucrat, Jan Jacob Beaujon, who was in turn replaced by an apparently more outspoken pro-French Patriot, Johann Rudolf Lauffer, all within the same year. Oostindie stresses that this reshuffle reflected dynamics inside the white elite, between Orangists and Patriots but also within Patriot circles, over questions that came down to trade and economic interest. Sections of the free coloured population had their own stake in the 1796 power games, mainly better representation in local politics, and there is evidence of open and sometimes violent free coloured protest, but no sign of organised cross-colour action aiming at radical change.